Archive for Cambridge
off to Durham
Posted in Kids, pictures, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags #ERCSyG, Cambridge, collegial university, Coventry, Duke University, Durham, Durham university, England, ERC, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, North Carolina, Ocean, Oxford, The North, USA, warwick university on August 31, 2026 by xi'an
a journal of the chaos year
Posted in Books, Running, Travel, Wines with tags Battle of Hastings, BD, Belledonne, Black Plague, book reviews, Cambridge, COVID-19, Daniel Defoe, Detroit, England, fairy story, fantasy, Gloria, Guillaume le Concquérant, horror story, Iceland, Japan, Journal of the Plague Year, Paris - Texas, pissaladière, Roma, Spaghetti alla bottarga, sumo, Sunset Boulevard, tapenade, Thelma and Louise, tuna on August 27, 2026 by xi'an
Read a few other books from my (physical and virtual) piles, starting with Once Was Willem by M.R. Carey, an horror story set in post-conquest England, when Mathilda and Stephens are competing for the throne and the country suffers. While the setup is much to my liking, right after Guillaume‘s conquest of Britain at Hastings, the story is too lame to be continued, with cardboard characters and an awful style, if trying to create a fake 12th Century feel. (With potatoes!!) I think I bought this book upon The Guardian’s recommendation. Or maybe it was Tor Reactor Mag‘s… And then Emily Wilde’s Encyclopedia of Faeries, by Heather Fawcett, another variation on the fae theme, with a mock scholarly approach but too much infodump and a contrived scenario. Not to mention idiotic characters and an incomprehensible avoidance for acknowledging Iceland as the location of the story. Volume 1 of a series shortlisted for the Hugo Awards, I wonder how it ended up there. (Same question about it being Elle Best book of the year!) I also went quickly through The Human Division, which is Old Man War #5 by John Scalzi, essentially made of several short stories in the OMW universe, regrouped into a single one, rather loosely. Not worth the time. Thanks to Andrew, who was in Paris at the time, I borrowed a great BD, DETROIT ROMA, which is a road movie, from Detroit (Michigan) to Roma (Georgia), drawn in an unusual if not pretty style, with many links to film classics like Gloria, 8 ½ and Sunset Boulevard, but also Paris, Texas (of course!) and Thelma and Louise.
Under the relentless heat, I prepare salad after salad, an uninterrupted series of rhubarb preserve, and my own version of Banh mi, with Lao Gan Ma spicy chili crisp oil (what else?!), peppers, cucumbers, lettuce, coriander and HM Breton tuna tataki, in a fresh whole wheat mini-baguette… I also made another batch of red onion pissaladière, cooked long enough to turn the onions into a tapenade. And had the pleasant surprise to see spaghetti alla bottarga on a restaurant menu (and have a great meal).Upon my son’s recommendation, I watched Sanctuary (サンクチュアリ-聖域) a Japanese series centred on modern sumo. While it is quite interesting and revealing for someone like me who never paid attention to the sport (it being as far as possible from running! Or climbing!), it is also a challenge to watch with a high level of violence and bullying, and not truly any frankly positive character. Plus a rather ambiguous perspective on hazing and harassment. It also made me wonder at the impact on bodies the training and combats involve.
lunch with David [and Meursault]
Posted in pictures, Statistics, Travel, University life, Wines with tags Burgundy wines, Cambridge, caricature, Côte de Beaune, COVID-19, David Spiegelhalter, England, Financial Times, interview, Mersea Island, Meursault, picnic, seafood, Suffolk, white wines on May 1, 2021 by xi'an
“My real beef, my real anger, is that hugely expensive programmes like test and trace did not have built in, right from the beginning, a capacity for experimental evaluation. They should have been running studies, different methodologies, different ways of tracing. As it is, we don’t know what benefit it’s had. It’s like rolling out vaccines without ever measuring whether they have an effect or not. For Heaven’s sake!”
stained glass to go
Posted in pictures, University life with tags Caius & Gonville College, Cambridge, Cambridge colleges, controversies, design of experiments, DNA helix, eugenics, Francis Crick, latin square, Ronald Fisher, stained glass, Venn diagram on July 6, 2020 by xi'an
the Kouign-Amann experiment
Posted in Kids, pictures, Travel with tags beurre salé, Bretagne, Breton, butter, Cambridge, Harvard University, home cooking, Kouign-Amann on June 10, 2019 by xi'an
Having found a recipe for Kouign-Amanns, these excessive cookies from Britanny that are essentially cooked salted butter!, I had a first try that ended up in disaster (including a deep cut on the remaining thumb) and a second try that went better as both food and body parts are concerned. (The name means cake of butter in Breton.)
The underlying dough is pretty standard up to the moment it starts being profusedly buttered and layered, again and again, until it becomes sufficiently feuilleté to put in the oven. The buttery nature of the product, clearly visibly on the first picture, implies the cookies must be kept in containers like these muffin pans to preserve its shape and keep the boiling butter from inundating the oven, two aspects I had not forecasted on the first attempt.
The other if minor drawback of these cookies is that they do not keep well as they contain so much butter. Bringing enough calories input for an hearty breakfast (and reminding me of those I ate in Cambridge while last visiting Pierre).
